Freshman Year. 

My freshman year of high school was breezy and easy, like the Washington skies. I was just growing out of the ridiculous haircut I had gotten in 8th grade, and nobody cared about all the drama that happened in middle school, anyway. I had a fresh start, and I intended to use it in this big new high school. 

I found my new best friend in drama class, which we both failed. She was warm and friendly like the summer, which was her name. We became inseparable, and I haven’t found a friend like her since. 

The majority of my freshman year revolved around one thing. He was tall and had green eyes. I’ll never forget the first time we held hands, also in drama class. We were watching 12 Summer Nights, by Shakespeare. I was playing with the ring on his finger that spun around in its metal case, and then I wasn’t. We were holding hands, and we did for the rest of the movie. At the end, the lights came on, and I didn’t know what to say. We just looked at each other. 

Hello, Green Eyes. I thought, and he raced off. 

Our first kiss was outside of his house. Although I didn’t have the best of eyesight, I could see his mom’s disapproving gaze from the living room window. But it happened anyway, and he ran off, just like before. 

See, he was dying of cancer. But one moment with him felt like forever, and that’s how I thought it would last. 

There were a lot of firsts with him. He was my first actual boyfriend, and my first real life lesson. He was also my first, and I was his first. We both skipped drama (the first class we ever skipped) to go to his house, and when we got back, everyone knew what we had done, and we pretended to be embarrassed. But we weren’t. 

It was also the first time I remember being truly happy, inside and out, or at least the first time since I had been a child. And we both sat in the class as the others teased us with grins on our faces, and when I looked at him, I was speechless.

Hello, Green Eyes. 

Sophomore Year. 

Sophomore year started out like my freshman year of high school, but ended very stormy, like the Colorado skies. My mom told me she “missed the mountains,” so it was goodbye Washington, and hello Colorado. Goodbye popularity, goodbye best friend, goodbye warm weather and happy feelings. 

Goodbye, Green Eyes.

I never really said goodbye to Green Eyes, not even online. I didn’t want to face the fact that it would hurt more to say goodbye than to pretend I had never left. Of course he found me and we talked, but I never told him out loud all that he meant to me. 

Growing up, everyone always told me to have no regrets. They never told me what to do when they started piling up. Nobody explained how to cope with guilt or how to get rid of the regrets. Not saying goodbye to that boy and telling him something, anything, still weighs on me today.

My family and I drove down to Colorado on a three-day trip on a crowded GreyHound bus, to a small trailer park on the very edge of a small town. My mom, her boyfriend, and my brother and sister, and I moved into a three-bedroom trailer with my mom’s friend and her son and daughter. You can imagine it was crowded. 

A few months after I started school, now poor and an outcast, I thought it couldn’t get any worse. Then I got a few messages from my friends back home telling me that he was dead. He died in his sleep. The cancer had won. At first I felt numb. All I could do was stare in the mirror, and think, goodbye, for real. 

Goodbye, green eyes. 

Junior Year. 

Junior year was a blur. The storm clouds in the sky paralleled the ever-present storm clouds in my mind. I didn’t go to class much. When I did, I was (please excuse my language) a frigid bitch to those around me. I had a few friends, but none of them went to the high school. I started to lash out at my mom and burn the bridges around me. 

I wouldn’t admit it, but all I wanted was my green eyes back. So there were plenty of blue eyes, and brown eyes, and blurry faces and one-night stands, and a lot of parties. I went to school less and less and started doing other things more and more. 

I snuck out all the time and ran away twice. I got into a fight with my mom’s boyfriend and he ended up in jail. That night, my mom told me I had to find somewhere else to stay. 

And I did, quickly. But my struggles were only beginning as I would have to learn how to balance school on top of my Couchsurfing lifestyle. 

As I walked through the cold one morning on my way to school, I caught my gaze in the reflection of a car window, and I stared glumly at my tired face.

I miss you, green eyes. 

Senior Year. 

Senior year was a silver lining on the horizon, like the morning I woke up after I had spent the night underneath the town bridge and gazed at the Colorado mountains with a new sense of determination. I was never going to have to do that again. I knew I deserved better, and I was the only person who was going to do something about it.

I switched schools to an alternative school called Horizons, and the principal of my old school agreed to reinstate my credits from Junior year as long as I passed all my classes in this new school. 

Although I still struggled with homelessness, drugs and alcohol, I found that life was easier in this new school. I was passing all my classes, and my future seemed hopeful. 

When I watched my sister graduate college from Fort Lewis, I had never felt so proud of anyone in my entire life. I wanted to feel that pride for myself, too.

My sister showed me her college diploma, and I showed her mine from high school. She hugged me. I looked at her straight in her eyes, which were normally a dark rich chocolate-brown. But at that moment, the sun shining through the clouds bounced off the vibrant sea of leaves to reflect that familiar sea-green hue I had not seen in a long time.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said, and smiled. 

“I’m proud of you, too,” I mumbled back, and smiled even bigger. 

I love you, Green Eyes. Thanks for everything. 

High school is a time of learning who you are, what you want to do, what you’re gonna be, and where you’re gonna go. One of the most important lessons I learned in those four years was that life can change in an instant. Life is resilient but can be fragile. Everyone always told me to have no regrets, but never told me what to do when you do find yourself carrying them around, like the heavy books in your school bag. What you can do is this: let your regrets change you. Let them teach you. Let them challenge you. Sometimes the only way to make things right is to do things differently, because you can’t change the past. Because time rolls by like the puffy clouds in the sky, and change is inevitable. So live a life that you are happy living, cherish and value people. Because eventually we all close our eyes. And man, I miss those green eyes. 

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